Thomas Cromwell 1-3

I

Mirror

June–July 1540

Sunset, Christophe stands on the threshold. His clothes are torn and his eye is blacked. ‘They made me swear an oath,’ he says, ‘that if I stayed with you I would report any treason you spoke. I swore it, and then I went outside and spat.’ He paces the room. ‘The river lies beyond. Escape can be committed.’

‘Turniphead,’ he says. ‘How can escape be committed? And if it could, how would that leave my family? Do you think you are all coming with me, to Utopia in one big boat?’

He thinks, at least Christophe has not stuck my knife in anybody; or if he has, they haven’t found the corpse.

‘They came trampling,’ the boy says. ‘They demanded keys and I said, give them nothing. But Thomas Avery and those people, they obeyed.’

‘They had no choice.’

‘They came like an army. “Everything here belongs to the king.” They carried our money away from our strongroom. They broke the lock on our closet, where you alone have the key. I said to one, “Watch your feet, you beast of the field, if you walk mud on that carpet of silk flowers, the Lord Cromwell will personally shred the flesh from your bones.” But no, he walked on it. They went down in the cellars with torches. They came up and said, “Bones!”’

Bones and relics, some nameless, some marked with their origin. He thinks, I will send a message: go down to the cellar and find Becket, then pull his label off. That will finish him.

He asks, ‘Who led them?’

‘Who would it be, but Call-Me?’

He looks up. ‘You were not surprised?’

‘No one was surprised. But we were all disgusted.’

He thinks, when Gardiner approached Wriothesley, he did not put a reasonable proposition: which do you choose, Cromwell or me? His offer was: choose me or death.

Christophe says, ‘They threw your papers in boxes to carry away. Call-Me directed where to go – look in this chest, open that. But he did not find all he expected, so then he shouted. Thomas Avery said, “I have suspected Call-Me for months – why did my master entertain him?”’

‘Christ entertained Judas. Not that I force the comparison.’

‘Then Richard Riche came. He also shouted. “Look in the yellow chest in the window.”’ Christophe grins. ‘The yellow chest is gone.’

Gone with it are his letters from the Swiss divines: which would injure him. They may choose to say he is a heretic who denies that God is in the host. But they will have no evidence. And he has no difficulty in saying that God is everywhere.

‘All look for your restoration,’ Christophe says. ‘You will walk back in and all will be as it was. Meanwhile, I am here to serve you.’ He gazes up at the gilded ceiling. ‘I feared to find you in a dungeon.’

‘Have you not been here before?’

He rebuilt these rooms himself, seven years back, for Anne Boleyn to lodge before her coronation. It was he who reglazed them, and ordered the goddesses on the walls; who had their eyes changed from brown to blue, when Jane Seymour came in. You enter through a great guard chamber. There is a presence chamber, where he now sits in a large light space; there is a dining room, a bedroom, and a small oratory. ‘It is not for my comfort,’ he says, ‘so much as for those who will come to put questions to me. I expect them soon.’

For the king’s councillors were prepared for my arrest, if I was not. How did they work it? What backhand whispers, what lifts of the eyebrow, what nods, winks? And what conferences with the king, their informants greasing in as I went out? No wonder Henry turned his back on me when last we spoke. No wonder he addressed himself to the wall. He says, ‘Tell Thurston not to hang up his apron. I want him to send in my meals.’

‘When you get out,’ Christophe says, ‘we nail down Norferk, pull his head off and toss it to the dogs. Riche, I’m spiking him to the floor and rats can nibble him, he can die slow as he likes, I am cheering. Call-Me, I am cutting his legs off and watch him crawl around the courtyard till he bleeds to death.’

He puts his head in his hands. He feels weakened by Christophe’s agenda.

‘It is to me entirely enjoyable,’ Christophe says. ‘I look forward. As for Henri, I shall kick him down Whitehall like a pig’s bladder. Once he is exploded, we shall see who is king. When he is a smear on the cobbles, we shall see who is the last man standing.’

That first night, left alone, he tries to pray. Chapuys had asked him once, what will you do when one day Henry turns on you? He had said, arm myself with patience and leave the rest to God.

There are books which say, contemplate your final hour: live every day as if, that night, you go not to your bed but to your bier. The divines recommend this not just for the prisoner or invalid, but for the man in his pride and pomp, prosperity and health: for the merchant on the Rialto, for the governor in the senate.

But I am not ready, he thinks. Let me see the foe. And the king is mutable. Everybody knows that. We complain of it all the time.

Yet is there an instance – he cannot think of one – where, having turned his face away, Henry turns it back? He left Katherine at Windsor and he never saw her again. He rode away from Anne Boleyn, gave directions to kill her, and left her to strangers.

He has read a library of those volumes called Mirrors for Princes, which state the wise councillor must always prepare for his fall. He should embrace death as a privilege; does not St Paul say, I covet to be dissolved with Christ? But he covets nothing more than to be in his garden on this soft evening, now fading unused beyond the window: where a strong guard stands, in case Cromwell decides on a breath of air.

He puts his hand to his heart. He feels something alien inside his chest – as if the organ has been forced out of shape, stretched at one point and squeezed at another. How many days left? My enemies will try to rush Henry. In case they cannot keep him in this destructive frame of mind, they will want me killed this week. But if the king wants to be free of Anna, he should keep me alive to help him, and perhaps it will not be a simple matter or short. If I can survive two months, by then Henry will have quarrelled with Gardiner, and when he turns to Norfolk what will he find, but obstinacy and incapacity and spleen? So who will govern for him? Fitzwilliam? Tunstall? Audley? They are good enough men – good enough to be a chief minister’s assistant. Three months, and his affairs will be in such disarray that he will be beseeching me to come back.

And I shall say, ‘Not me, sir: I’ve had enough of you, I’m going to Launde.’

But next moment, within a heartbeat, I would snatch the seals from his hands: now, Majesty, where shall I begin?

He thinks of Thomas More, in ward for fifteen months. Continually he scribbled, till his pen and paper were taken away. Although, More could have freed himself at any moment. All he had to do was say some magic words.

When the Giant kills Jack, the Giant himself begins to fail. He is worn down and diminished with loneliness and regret. But it takes the Giant seven years to die.

Next morning Kingston comes in at eight o’clock. ‘How do you?’

‘I do very ill,’ he says.

There are mirrors in the queen’s lodging, as you would expect. He has seen himself, paper-faced, unshaven, unsteady.

‘I have seen this before,’ Kingston says. ‘It afflicts not a few prisoners, in their early days. Especially if their downfall is sudden.’

‘What remedy?’

Perhaps no one has ever asked Kingston this before. But he is not a man to hesitate. ‘Accept it. Settle your mind. Make your reckoning with yourself, my lord.’

‘I am still “my lord”?’

Kingston says, ‘You came in here as Earl of Essex, and you are Essex unless I am told otherwise.’

So Gardiner was wrong: wrong on big things and wrong on little things. He is not sure if his earldom is a little thing. In the sight of God, perhaps it is. But he had felt it, this last two months, as protection, a wall the king had built around him.

‘Also,’ Kingston says, ‘the king has sent money for your support while you are here. He wishes you to be kept as befits your rank.’

He wants to say, my support for how long? Kingston answers without being asked: ‘The king will fund what is needed. No term is set.’

Till yesterday, he had money of his own. Now he is the king’s beggar. Kingston says, as if it were a matter of indifference, ‘Your boy is here.’

An uprush of anguish: ‘Gregory?’

‘I mean young Sadler. Or rather, Master Secretary, Sir Rafe, one forgets these recent promotions. No, bless you, he is not in ward, I mean he is without, he is waiting for you. Call for anything you need.’

In his black clothes Rafe looks overheated. ‘Morning, sir. That wind has dropped. It’s as warm as August out there. They say this will go on all summer. We can’t be suited, can we? Warm, cold, we’re always complaining.’ His glance flits up and down the room, because he cannot look at his master. He takes off his cap and crushes it, his fingers bruising the velvet.

‘Rafe,’ he says, ‘come here.’ He embraces him. ‘Kingston frightened me, I thought they had arrested you.’

Tentatively, Rafe touches his sleeve, as if to test if he is still solid. ‘I think they would have, except the king does not want the disruption to his business. I hardly know where I am. Early this morning I sent Helen and the little ones out of London.’

‘They will be watching you.’ He sits down again. ‘I am ill, Rafe. My breath comes short. I feel crushed, here. Kingston tells me I have to get used to it.’

‘It is shock, sir. I did not know myself what was happening, or I would have got a warning to you somehow. As we were going into council, they had someone call me back for some footling piece of business – and next thing, as I was hastening in your direction, I saw a crowd streaming away. Audley said to me, “Your master is arrested, and I am going to the Parliament house to announce it.” He was prepared. He had the paper in his pocket. He was just waiting for word from the guard.’

He thinks, I had scarcely a foot in the boat, and they were rowing me across the Styx. ‘And how did Parliament take it?’

‘In silence, sir.’

He nods. Both Lords and Commons might have been astonished, that a man made an earl in April is by June kicked out like a dog who’s stolen the beef. But then, Parliament men do not expect to understand the king’s mind. He does not answer for himself downwards, to his subjects – only upwards, to the Almighty; and perhaps, these days, not even that. To hear Henry talk, you would think God ought to be grateful, for all Henry has done for him in England these last ten years: the way he’s set him up, got his big book translated, made him the common talk.

Rafe says, ‘Edward Seymour went at once to the king, to speak for Gregory.’

‘Did he speak for me?’

‘No, sir.’

‘Did anyone speak for me?’

‘Yes. But I was not heard.’

‘Not Cranmer?’

‘Cranmer is writing the king a letter.’

‘Try and get me its content.’ He lowers his head. ‘When I think of Call-Me … I wonder what inducement … I suppose I expected it of Riche. Though I have been good to them both.’

Rafe would be justified in saying, I told you at the first not to trust Call-Me. Instead he says, ‘All the years we have known him, I think he has been trying to show us his own unhappy nature. How fretful he is, how ill-at-ease, how envy eats away at him. He was trying to warn us about himself.’

‘It is my vanity, really. I did not suppose anyone would prefer Gardiner’s service to mine.’

‘Gardiner has threatened him. But you know that. As for Purse, he runs to the day’s winner.’

‘Tell Gregory,’ he says, ‘to be as humble as he finds it necessary. He will be questioned, and he should say what they want to hear. Richard too.’

‘Richard is enraged. He wanted to go straight to the king and break in on him.’

‘Tell him to do no such thing. He should rest quiet, and keep away from Gregory, and both should keep away from you. Do nothing that could be called conspiracy. I know how Henry’s mind works.’

Even as he says it, he thinks, that can’t be true, or I wouldn’t be here. Separation from his friends will not save my son. Money abroad will not save him. All he can do is to comply with Henry exactly, till his killing fit passes. ‘How did he take it, Gregory?’ He pictures his boy inconsolable, crying like a child.

‘He is pensive, sir.’

Pensive? But then, if they had come to him when he was a boy to say, ‘They’re hanging your old dad tomorrow,’ he wouldn’t have been pensive. He’d have said, ‘I’ll be there early! Are they selling pies?’

He asks, ‘Has the king let fall a word about what charges to expect? Or Audley has, perhaps?’

Rafe looks away. ‘It appears to be about Mary as much as anything. The stories of how you meant to marry her. The king has decided to hear them at last. He has written to François about it – in his own hand, I am told. He has sent for Marillac, to explain your arrest to him. Though I think it is Marillac who will explain it to the king, because the French were active in those rumours.’

‘Chapuys started them.’

‘Perhaps. Who knows where it began? Perhaps in Mary’s head. I would not be surprised. She is a very strange woman.’

‘No,’ he says, ‘she is innocent in this, I swear.’

‘You have always thought better of her than she deserves. I doubt she will stir for you, sir, though we all know you saved her life. Henry believes – but I do not know how he can believe it – that you meant to wed her and then thrust him aside and become king yourself.’

‘That is ludicrous. How could he think that? How could I? How could I even imagine it? Where is my army?’

Rafe shrugs. ‘He is frightened of you, sir. You have outgrown him. You have gone beyond what any servant or subject should be.’

It is the cardinal over again, he thinks. Wolsey was broken not for his failures, but for his successes; not for any error, but for grievances stored up, about how great he had become.

He asks, ‘Did they take my books?’

‘Tell me what you want and I will get it.’

‘Will you find my Hebrew grammar? Nicolas Clendardus of Leuven. I have it at Stepney. I have wanted to study it. I lacked leisure.’

Clendardus advises, grasp the basic rules before you advance to detail. They say with his help you can learn the rudiments in three months. I might not live that long, he thinks, but I can make a start.

12 June, first interrogation: ‘We might begin with the purple satin doublet,’ Richard Riche says.

Riche sits at one end of the long table, with Gardiner and Norfolk established in the places of honour; and Master Secretary Wriothesley, restless and unhappy, at the other end. ‘You know,’ he says, as Norfolk and Gardiner take their seats, ‘I never knew you as such great comrades, till lately. More likely to abuse each other roundly, than sit together as friends.’

‘We have not always seen eye to eye,’ Norfolk says. ‘But one thing we have in common, Winchester and I – when we scent the truth, we stick on the trail. So beware, Cromwell. Whatever we suspect, we will have out of you, one way or the other.’

It is as crude a threat as ever made. He says, ‘I will tell you the truth, as I know and believe it. There is nothing for you beyond that.’

Gardiner sharpens his pen. ‘They say Truth is the daughter of time. I wish time bred like rabbits. We would arrive at a reckoning sooner.’

A clerk comes in. He greets him in Welsh. ‘Give you good morning, Gwyn. Nice sunny weather.’

‘None of that,’ Norfolk growls. ‘Get this fellow out and send another scribe.’

Gwyn gathers his gear and exits. It takes time to locate a clerk that suits Thomas Howard, and one Thomas Cromwell does not know. At length they are settled. Wriothesley says, ‘Will you go on, Riche? The doublet?’

Riche lays a hand on his papers, like one putting it on the gospels. ‘You understand, sir, that it is my duty to put these questions to you, and that I bear you no ill-will in the doing of it.’

He recognises a disclaimer. Riche thinks Henry might recall him. He says, ‘Can I see the king?’

‘No, by God,’ Norfolk says.

Wriothesley says, ‘That is the last thing –’

Riche says, ‘Whatever gave your lordship that idea?’

He takes his ruby ring from his finger. ‘The King of France gave me this.’

‘Did he?’ Norfolk cries out to the clerk. ‘Make a note, you!’

‘And when he did so, I took it to our king. Who in time was pleased to return it to me, saying it would be a token between us, and that if I were to send it him, even if I did not have my seal, even if I were not able to write, he would know it came from me. So I send it him now.’

‘But what is the point?’ Gardiner says.

‘A good question,’ Riche says. ‘The king knows where you are. He knows who and what you are.’

‘It will remind him how I have served him, to the best of my capacities and to the utmost of my strength. As I hope to do for many years yet.’

‘That is what we are here to determine,’ Riche says. ‘Whether you have served him or no. Whether you have abused his confidence, as he believes, and whether you plotted against his throne.’

Riche must somehow be assured, he thinks, and Wriothesley too, that if Henry frees me I will not revenge: or they will kill me in a panic. ‘How, plotted?’ He asks civilly, as if it were a matter of passing interest.

‘Letters have been discovered at Austin Friars,’ Gardiner says. ‘Highly prejudicial to your claims to be a loyal and quiet subject.’

‘Clear proof of treason,’ Norfolk says.

‘I am waiting for you to tell me what they are. I cannot guess what you might forge, can I?’

‘They are Lutheran letters,’ Riche says. ‘Letters from Martin himself and his heretic brethren.’

‘Melanchthon?’ he asks. ‘The king writes to him.’

Gardiner glares. ‘And also from German princes, urging on you a course most injurious to king and commonwealth.’

‘There are no such letters,’ he says, ‘they never existed, and even if they did –’

‘Lawyer’s logic,’ Norfolk says.

‘– and even if they did, and if they contained seditious matter, would I keep them in my house for you to find? Ask Wriothesley what he thinks.’

Gardiner looks at Call-Me. ‘What I think …’ he hesitates, ‘what I truly …’ He stops.

‘Pass on,’ he says. ‘Or are you waiting for me to set the agenda and run the meeting? I think you wanted to know about my wardrobe.’

‘Yes, the doublet,’ Riche says. ‘We will begin there, and return to the treasonous correspondence when Mr Wriothesley is more himself. In the cardinal’s day you owned, and were seen to wear, a doublet of purple satin.’

He does not laugh, because he sees where this is tending.

Norfolk demands, ‘What gave you the right to wear such a colour? It is the preserve of royal persons and high dignitaries of the church.’

Riche says, ‘Was it perhaps violet? If violet, it can be excused.’

Wriothesley says, ‘I saw it myself. It was purple. And moreover, you had sables.’

He thinks, not like the beautiful sables I have bought since. ‘I feel the cold. Besides, they were a gift. From a foreign client who did not know our rules.’

Riche’s brow furrows. This answer takes him in so many promising directions he hardly knows which to follow. ‘When you say a client, you mean a foreign prince?’

‘Princes did not send me gifts. Not at that date.’

‘Still,’ Gardiner says, ‘if your client did not know the rules, you knew them.’

Norfolk sticks to his point: ‘It was above your rank and station, to dress as if you were an earl already.’

‘True,’ he says, ‘but why would your lordship object, if the king did not? He would not like to see his ministers go in homespun.’

Norfolk says, ‘The doublet is only a single example, of your insensate ungodly pride. It’s not just your attire that offends. It’s the way you talk. The way you put yourself forward. Interrupt the king’s discourse. Interrupt me. Scorn ambassadors, the envoys of great princes. They come to your house, and you give out you’re not in, when you are in. Then they hear you in the garden playing bowls! They know when they are held in contempt.’

‘Speaking of ambassadors …’ Riche says.

Gardiner snaps, ‘Not yet.’

Norfolk says, ‘The king has entrusted you with high office. And you scant the procedures that are laid down. You reach across and put your signature to some scrap of paper, and thousands are paid out without a warrant. There is no part of the king’s business you do not meddle in. You override the council. You pull state policy out of your pocket. You read other men’s letters. You corrupt their households to your own service. You take their duties out of their hands.’

‘I act when they should act,’ he says. ‘Sometimes government must accelerate.’ He thinks, I cannot wait for the slow grindings of your brain. ‘We must move in anticipation of events.’

‘I do not see how,’ Riche says. ‘Unless you consult sorcerers.’

The gentlemen glance at each other. He says, ‘Are you done about the doublet?’

Messengers come in and whisper in Gardiner’s ear. A paper is given him, and shuffled surreptitiously to the duke, but not before he, Thomas Essex, catches a glimpse of the seal of the King of France. Norfolk seems pleased by what he reads – so pleased he cannot keep it to himself. ‘François congratulates our king on his initiative.’

‘Your putting down,’ Gardiner clarifies. ‘The French have much to tell us, regarding your ambitions. Not to mention your methods of discharging our sovereign’s trust.’

It is then he grasps what has eluded him: the timing, the personnel. It must have been in early spring, when Norfolk was so keen to cross the sea, that François first hinted at an alliance and named his price. The price was me, and the king baulked at it: until now.

He says, ‘The French like to deal with you, my lord Norfolk.’

Norfolk looks as if he has been congratulated. By the living God, he thinks, I do not know which is greater: Norfolk’s vanity, or his stupidity. Of course the French prefer a minister who they can bewilder and trick and – if it comes to it – purchase.

‘I want to take us back …’ Riche says.

‘I am sure you do,’ he says. ‘You had better change the subject, because you are in danger of proving how bad a minister I have been for François.’

Riche is leafing through an old letter-book. ‘You made a great deal of money in the cardinal’s day.’

‘Not so much from Wolsey. From my legal practice, yes.’

‘How did you do that?’

‘Long hours.’

‘Wolsey commonly enriched his servants,’ Wriothesley says.

‘He did – as Stephen here can testify. But one had expenses. The cardinal fell from grace before his debts could be paid. His enemies fell on his assets. He cost me money, in the end.’

‘When you say his enemies, you mean the king?’

‘Oh, give me some credit, Gardiner. Am I likely to gratify you by calling the king a thief?’

‘You adhered to Wolsey,’ Riche says, ‘even when he was a proven traitor.’

‘What you call “adherence” is what the king called loyalty.’

‘He does,’ Wriothesley says. He sounds almost tearful. ‘I have heard him.’

He looks up at Call-Me. I don’t care how you cry. You’ve picked your side. He says, ‘The king regrets the cardinal. He misses him to this day.’

Gardiner says, ‘Can we leave the cardinal out of this? It is a living traitor we seek.’

Riche says testily, ‘I want to get on, I want to get on to Lady Mary, but I cannot do that without mentioning …’

Gardiner sighs. ‘If you must.’

Riche says, ‘You wore a ring, which Wolsey gave you. It was said to possess certain properties …’

‘You covet it, Ricardo? I can have it sent to you. It will save you from drowning.’

‘You see!’ Norfolk says. ‘It is a sorcerer’s ring. He admits it.’

He smiles. ‘It preserves the wearer from wild beasts. It also secures the favour of princes. It doesn’t seem to be working, does it?’

‘It also …’ Riche is embarrassed. He rubs his upper lip. ‘It also, allegedly, makes princesses fall in love with you.’

‘I’m turning them away daily.’

Wriothesley says, ‘You didn’t turn the Lady Mary away.’

Riche says, ‘You presumed, and the king knows it, you presumed to practise upon her, to insinuate yourself with her, to ingratiate yourself, so that she referred to you as,’ he consults his notes, ‘my only friend.’

‘If we are speaking of the days after the death of Anne Boleyn, then I think it is true, I was her only friend. Mary would be dead now, if I had not persuaded her to obey her father.’

‘And why were you so interested in saving her life?’ Gardiner asks.

‘Perhaps because I am a Christian man.’

‘Perhaps because you hoped she would reward you.’

‘She was a powerless girl. How could she reward me?’

Norfolk says, ‘It was your dreadful presumption, offensive to Almighty God, to attempt to marry her.’

‘For instance,’ Riche says, ‘upon a certain occasion, you were her Valentine and made her a gift.’

He is impatient. ‘You know how that works. We draw lots.’

‘Yes,’ Wriothesley says, ‘but you rigged the ballot. You have boasted of your ways to manipulate elections of any sort. Even the draw at a tournament – I offer this, and my recollection is perfectly clear – the day your son made his debut in the field, you told him, never fear, I can get you on the king’s team, then you will not have to run against his Majesty.’

‘Gregory told you that?’

‘He told me that very day. You hurt his pride.’

‘He spoke in innocence. And to you, Call-Me, because he took you for his friend. But I suppose you must use what you have. Valentines? Sorcerers? Any jury would laugh you out of court.’

But, he thinks, there will be no jury. There will be no trial. They will pass a bill to put an end to me. I cannot complain of the process. I have used it myself.

Riche is frowning. ‘There was a ring,’ he says. ‘I think you offered Mary a ring, summer of 1536.’

‘It was not a lover’s ring. And in the end it was not a ring at all, it was a piece to wear at her girdle.’ He closes his eyes. ‘Because it was too heavy. There were too many words.’

‘What words?’ Norfolk says.

‘Words enjoining obedience.’

Gardiner affects to be startled. ‘You thought she should obey you?’

‘I thought she should obey her father. And I showed the object to his Majesty. I thought it a wise precaution, against the kind of insinuation you make now. He liked it so well that he took it for himself, to give to her.’

Wriothesley drops his eyes. ‘That’s true, my lord. I was there.’

Riche gives his colleague a poisonous glance. ‘All the same, the volume of your correspondence with the lady, your manifest influence with her, the nature of the information she confides to you, information that concerns her bodily –’

‘You mean she told me she had toothache?’

‘She confided things proper for a physician to know. Not a stranger.’

‘I was hardly a stranger.’

‘Perhaps not,’ Riche says. ‘In fact, she sent you presents. She sent you a pair of gloves. That signifies, “hand-in-glove”. It signifies alliance. It signifies, matrimony.’

‘The King of France once sent me a pair of gloves. He didn’t want to marry me.’

‘It disgusts me,’ Norfolk says. ‘That a woman of noble blood should lower herself.’

‘Do not blame the lady,’ Gardiner says sharply. ‘Cromwell made her believe only his own person stood between herself and death.’

‘There you have it,’ he says. ‘My person. It was my purple doublet she could not resist.’

‘I remember well,’ Norfolk says, ‘though by the Mass I cannot swear to the date –’

He, Thomas Essex, rolls his eyes. ‘Let no scruple impede you, my lord …’

‘– but there were others standing by,’ Norfolk says, ‘so I dare say –’

‘Out with it,’ Gardiner says.

‘– I remember a certain conversation – could a woman rule, was the topic, could Mary rule – and you, bursting in, as is your habit, on the discourse of gentlemen, said, “It depends who she marries.”’

Gardiner smiles. ‘It was the autumn of 1530. I was present.’

‘And since that time,’ Riche says, ‘you have ensured that Lady Mary never makes a marriage. All her suitors are sent away.’

‘And I remember,’ Norfolk says, ‘when the king took his fall at the joust –’

‘24 January, 1536,’ Gardiner says.

‘– when the king was carried to a tent and lay on a bier either dead or dying, all your concern was, “Where is Mary?”’

‘I thought to secure her person. To protect her.’

‘From?’

‘From you, my lord Norfolk. And your niece, Anne the queen.’

‘And if you had laid hands on her,’ Gardiner says, ‘what would you have done?’

‘You tell me,’ he says. ‘What makes the best story? Do I seduce her, or enforce her?’ He throws out his hands. ‘Oh, come on, Stephen – I no more meant to marry her than you did.’

Gardiner is cold. ‘Kindly address me as what I am.’

He grins. ‘It never seemed likely to me you should be a bishop. But I beg your pardon.’

‘Leave aside marriage,’ Gardiner says. ‘There are other means of control. The king believes you meant to place Mary on the throne and rule through her. And to this end you cultivated your friendship with Chapuys, the Emperor’s man.’

‘He dined with you twice in the week,’ Call-Me says.

‘You would know. You were at the table.’

‘He was your friend. Your confidant.’

‘I have no confidants, and few friends. Though till yesterday, I put you among them.’

‘I was present at your house at Canonbury,’ Wriothesley says, ‘when you conferred with Chapuys in the garden tower. You made him certain promises. About Mary, her future estate.’

‘I made no promises.’

‘She thought you did. And Chapuys thought you did.’

He remembers the ambassador’s folio, on the grass among the daisies. The marble table, the envoy’s suspicion of the strawberries. The gradual clouding of the day, so that Christophe said that in Islington they feared thunder. Then Call-Me, at the foot of the tower in the twilight, a sheaf of peonies in his hand.

Gardiner promises, ‘Another day we will come to the bribes the Emperor gave you. For now let us pursue the matter of your marriage. The Lady Mary was not your only prospect. You took care that Lady Margaret Douglas was preserved, though guilty of wilful disobedience to the king.’

Wriothesley bursts out, ‘I uncovered that whole affair! And you talked it away, as if it were nothing.’

‘Not nothing,’ he says. ‘Her sweetheart died.’ He says to Norfolk, ‘I am sorry I could not save them both.’

Norfolk makes a sound of disgust. He has many brothers, he hardly misses Tom Truth. ‘You put her under a debt of gratitude,’ he says. ‘The king’s niece. What was she to you, but another path to the throne? “If I were king” is a phrase often in your mouth.’

Gardiner leans forward. ‘We have all heard you say it.’

He nods. It is a habit he should have checked. Once he said, ‘If I were the king, I’d spend more time in Woking. In Woking it never snows.’

‘You smile?’ Gardiner is shocked. ‘You, a manifest traitor, who offered to meet the king in battle?’

‘What?’ He is blank: still thinking of Woking.

‘Let me remind you,’ Riche says. ‘At the church of St Peter le Poor, near your own gate at Austin Friars, on or around …’ Riche has lost the date, but no matter, ‘… you were heard to pronounce certain treasonable words: that you would maintain your own opinion in religion, that you would never allow the king to return to Rome, and – these are the words alleged – if he would turn, yet I would not turn; and I would take the field against him, my sword in my hand. And you accompanied these words with certain belligerent gestures –’

‘Is this likely?’ he says. ‘Even if I had such thoughts, is it likely I would speak them out? In a public place? Surrounded by witnesses?’

‘One utters in a rage sometimes,’ Norfolk says.

‘Speak for yourself, my lord.’

‘You also stated,’ Riche says, ‘that you would bring new doctrine into England, and that – and here I quote your own words – If I live one year or two, it shall not lie in the king’s power to resist.’

‘What though you are a cautious man?’ Gardiner says. ‘I have seen you moved to mockery, and to wrath.’

‘I have seen you moved to tears,’ Riche says.

‘I could weep now,’ he says. He is thinking, yet I would not turn. Perhaps I may have spoken those words. Not in public. But in private. To Bess Darrell. I am not too old to take my sword in my hand. I will fight for Henry, I meant to say. But the god of contraries made me say the opposite. And I could have bitten out my tongue.

Riche has recovered a date. ‘Peter le Poor – last day of January –’

‘This year?’

‘Last.’

‘Last year? Where have the witnesses been since? Were they not culpable, in concealing treason? I look forward to seeing them in chains.’

He can see Riche thinking, look, now he is wrathful, now he is provoked. He might say anything.

‘You admit it is treason?’ Norfolk says.

‘Yes, my lord,’ he says patiently, ‘but I do not admit to saying it. How would I make good such threats? How could I overthrow the king?’

‘Perhaps with the help of your Imperial friends,’ Norfolk says. ‘Chapuys is not in the realm, but you have contact with him, do you not? He congratulated you, on your earldom. I hear he plans to return.’

‘He’ll have to go somewhere else for his dinner,’ he says.

‘Why do we trouble ourselves over Chapuys?’ Riche says. ‘It is much worse than that, as all will attest, who were in Sadler’s garden at Hackney, the night the king met his daughter.’

The apostle cups, he thinks. The great bowl buried in the earth to keep our wine cool. Riche says, ‘You had secret dealings with Katherine. And that night you confessed as much.’

‘You have known a long while, Riche. What kept you from speaking out?’

No answer. ‘I will tell you,’ he says. ‘Your own advantage kept you mute. Till advantage was greater on the other side. What promise have I made to you, that I have not kept? And what promises have you made to me?’

‘You should not speak of promises,’ Norfolk says. ‘The king hates a man who breaks his word. You said you would kill Reginald Pole.’

‘Not a drop of his blood is shed,’ Gardiner observes.

He thinks, now we come to it. This is why Henry faults me. And so he should. This is where I have failed.

Riche says, ‘There was much big talk in your household, how you would trap Reginald. One week, you would set on him murderers you knew in Italy. Another week, it was your nephew Richard who would kill him. Then it was Francis Byran, then it was Thomas Wyatt.’

Wriothesley says, ‘And on that subject – one wonders, when Wyatt was ambassador lately, for what reason he held back certain letters from the Lady Mary, that the Emperor was meant to see. Was he not acting for you, as your agent?’

‘My agent? For what purpose?’

‘Some dishonesty,’ Riche says. ‘We have not yet penetrated it.’

‘But no doubt we shall,’ Gardiner says. ‘Mr Wriothesley has overheard so much loose and treasonous talk, merely in the course of daily business. He heard you say recently that you would do the King of France a favour, if he would do one for you. One wonders what ensued.’

‘Nothing ensued,’ he said. ‘He has not done me any favours, has he? It is my lord Norfolk who is in his graces.’

‘Then why say it?’ Riche presses.

‘Big talk. You said it yourself. My household’s full of it.’

Gardiner puts his fingertips together. ‘Add the braggarts in with the rest, and your household falls little short of three thousand persons. It is the household of a prince. Your livery is seen not only through London, but through England.’

‘Three thousand? With that number I would be bankrupt. Look, every man in England has applied to me these seven years, to take his son into my service. I take who I can, and bring them up in learning and good manners. For the most part their fathers pay their keep, so you cannot say I employ them.’

‘You speak as if they were all meek scribblers,’ Gardiner says. ‘But it is well-known that you take in runaway apprentices, roisterers, ruffians …’

‘Yes,’ he says, ‘roaring boys such as Richard Riche was once, in days he would rather forget. I do not deny I give a second life to those who have the enterprise to knock at my gates.’ He looks at Riche. ‘Any chancer has his chance with me.’

‘You feed the poor at your gates every day,’ Norfolk says.

‘It is what great men do.’

‘You think they will rise in your support, a pauper army. Well, they will not, sir. They will not favour a shearsman, such as you once were.’ The duke affects to shiver. ‘Great man, you call yourself! St Jude protect me!’

Riche selects a paper from his file. ‘I have here the inventories from Austin Friars. You owned some three hundred handguns, four hundred pikes, near eight hundred bows, and halberds and harness for, as my lord Norfolk says, an army. I have heard you say, and Wriothesley will bear me out, that you had a bodyguard of three hundred that would come to your whistle, day or night.’

‘When the northern rebels were up,’ he says, ‘I was ashamed I could not turn out enough men of my own. So I did what any loyal subject would do, if he had means. I augmented my resources.’

‘Oh, you prate of your loyalty,’ Norfolk says. ‘When you would have sold the king to heretics! When you would have sold Calais to foul sacramentaries –’

‘I?’ he says. ‘Sold Calais? Look to the Lisles for that. It is to them and the Poles you should look for treason. Not to me, who owes everything to the king – but to those who think it their natural right to sweep him aside. To those who think his family’s rule a mere interruption to their own.’

Gardiner says, ‘My lord Norfolk, shall we come to Calais another day?’

He can see the bishop’s feet under the board, barely restraining themselves from kicking the duke’s shins. Presumably they are still taking testimony from Lord Lisle, and have not decided into what form of lie they will bend it.

Richard Riche taps his papers. ‘My lord bishop, I have such matter here …’

Gardiner stands up. ‘Save it.’

He, Cromwell, wants to hold Gardiner back, reason with him. Winchester knows this is silly stuff – rings, sorcerers, Valentines – and he is ashamed, no doubt, of what has come out of his own mouth. But Gardiner sweeps out, Norfolk bustling after: Riche beckons the clerk to help him with his files. ‘I wish you a pleasant evening, my lord,’ he says: as if they were at home at Austin Friars.

Mr Wriothesley looks after them. He stands up; he seems to need support, and clings to the trestle top. ‘Sir –’

‘Save your breath.’

‘When I was in Brussels, a hostage, I hear you did not lift a finger for me.’

‘That is not true.’

‘You said that if they held me in prison in Vilvoorde, you could not get me out.’

‘No more could I.’

‘That scoundrel Harry Phillips – you set me and others to entrap him, when you yourself were using him as your agent and spy.’

‘Who told you that?’

‘Bishop Gardiner. You let me suffer because of Phillips. I took him in good faith to my lodging, and he robbed me, and made me look a fool.’

‘I never made use of Phillips,’ he says. ‘Truly. He has always been too slippery for me.’

‘Sir, Norfolk wants them to hang you at Tyburn, like a common thief. And because you are a traitor he wants them to pull your bowels out. He wants you to suffer the most painful death the law affords. He is set on it.’

‘You seem set on it yourself.’

‘No, sir. You understand how it is with me. I can do no other than I do, I assure you. But I want to see you treated with honour. If need be I shall petition the king.’

‘Christ, Call-Me,’ he says, ‘stand up straight. How do you think you will fare with Henry these next few years, if you are cringing and whining in the presence of a man who, you say yourself, is doomed?’

‘I trust not, sir.’ His voice is unsteady. ‘The king gives you permission to write to him. Do it tonight.’

Gardiner stands in the doorway. ‘Wriothesley?’

Call-Me tries to pick up his papers, but a letter drops out and he has to kneel on the floor to fish it from under the table. It has the Courtenay seal, and he – Essex– wants to trap it with his foot and make Call-Me scrap for it. But he thinks, what’s the point? He puts out a hand to help the young man to his feet. ‘Take him,’ he says to Gardiner. ‘He’s all yours.’

Late afternoon, Rafe comes. He hears his voice and his heart leaps. He thinks, if Henry changes his mind, it is Rafe he will send.

But he knows from the boy’s face there is no good news. ‘And yet he permits you to visit me,’ he says. ‘Is that not a hopeful sign?’

‘He is afraid you might get out,’ Rafe says. ‘He has set a strong guard. But he does not think I have a martial character.’

‘What does he think I might do to him, if I did get out?’

‘Here is Cranmer’s letter,’ Rafe says. ‘I will wait.’

He walks to the window with it; he has not his spectacles, he needs some brought in. The paper seems to shake as he unfolds it. Cranmer, having heard of his treason, expresses himself both sorrowful and amazed: he that was so advanced by your Majesty: he whose surety was only by your Majesty: he who loved your Majesty, as I ever thought, no less than God … he that cared for no man’s displeasure to serve your Majesty: he that was such a servant, in my judgement, in wisdom, diligence, faithfulness and experience, as no prince in this realm ever had … I loved him as my friend, for so I took him to be; but I chiefly loved him for the love which I thought I saw him bear ever towards your grace …

… but now …

He looks up. ‘Now it comes … on the one hand, on the other …’

… but now, if he be a traitor, I am sorry that I ever loved or trusted him … but yet again I am very sorrowful …

He folds the paper. Fear seeps from the fold. He says, ‘You must understand, Rafe, Cranmer and I agreed long ago, that if one of us looked set to go down, the other would save himself.’

‘That may be, sir. But I think he should have got himself to the king’s presence. If the archbishop had been in peril of his life, would you have stood by? I don’t think you would.’

‘Don’t make me answer questions. It’s been questions all day. Cranmer does what is in him. It is all any man can do. Rafe, what happened to my picture? That Hans made?’

‘Helen took it, sir. She has it safe.’

‘Where is The Book Called Henry?’

‘We burned it, sir. I took my people to your house before Wriothesley came there. We burned a great many things, and raked the ashes into the garden.’

‘Absence speaks.’

‘But not clearly,’ Rafe says. ‘I do not believe they can bring a single substantial charge against you. John Wallop has written from France, with what he can dredge up. They say it was the common talk there that you meant to make yourself king.’ Rafe bows his head. ‘François sent a letter, and the king had me English it and read it out to the council. I myself.’

‘It was a test. I hope you passed.’

‘François says, now Cromwell is gone we can be friends again. I am clear in my own mind that this was what he broached with Norfolk in February. And therefore it is no wonder he and Winchester have been so bold. All their conferences behind the hand, their dinners and their masques … and of course they have the girl, parading her where the king cannot help but see her.’

‘Rafe,’ he says, ‘would you bring me some more books? Petrarch, his Remedies for Fortune. Thomas Lupset, The Way of Dying Well.’

Lupset was tutor to the cardinal’s son. He wrote not a moment too soon, for he was dead at thirty-five.

Rafe says, ‘Do not yield. Do not resign yourself, I beg you. You know the king is impulsive …’

‘Is he? We always say so.’ But perhaps his caprices are designed to keep us working and keep us hoping. Anne Boleyn thought till her last moment that he would change his mind. She died incredulous.

When Rafe goes out he turns back to Cranmer’s letter. He sees the question that his archbishop leaves for Henry: Who will your Grace trust thereafter, if you cannot trust him?

That evening he sits down to write to the king. The late afternoon had brought Fitzwilliam, with a fresh file which he ran through briskly: moving on to new ground, with conversations alleged, confederacies, conspiracies and – a strange one this – breaching the king’s confidence by talking about his futile nights with the queen. ‘But everybody knew,’ he had said, baffled. ‘And he gave his permission for me to talk to you, and to people in Anna’s household.’

‘He doesn’t recall that now,’ Fitzwilliam said. ‘He thinks you have made him a laughing stock.’

Fitzwilliam and his hangers-on had pestered him for half an hour. Not once did his fellow councillor look him in the face till at last they took themselves out for their supper.

Christophe sets out ink and paper. He can write by nature’s light; it is dusk, but a window gives onto the garden. What can he say? Once Henry had told him, ‘You were born to understand me.’ That understanding has broken down. He has sorely offended, and all he can do is argue that whatever his offence, he has not committed it wilfully, or out of malice: that he trusts God will reveal the truth. He begins with the usual phrases expressing his lowliness: one cannot do too much for Henry in this way, or at least, a prisoner cannot. Prostrate at the feet of your most excellent Majesty, I have heard your pleasure … that I should write such things as I thought meet concerning my miserable state …

He thinks, I have never limited my desires. Just as I have never slacked my labours, so I have never said, ‘Enough, I am now rewarded.’

Mine accusers your Grace knoweth, God forgive them. For as I ever had love to your honour, person, life, prosperity, health, wealth, joy and comfort, and also your most dear and most entirely beloved son, the Prince his Grace, and your proceedings, God so help me in this mine adversity, and confound me if ever I thought the contrary.

They are rewriting my life, he thinks. They represent that all my obedience has been outward obedience, and all these years in secret I have been creeping closer to Henry’s enemies – such as his daughter, my supposed bride. Perhaps I should have told him the truth about Mary. But I will spare her now. I cannot help my own daughter, I can only help the king’s.

What labours, pains and travails I have taken according to my most bounden duty God also knoweth. For if it were in my power, as it is in God’s, to make your Majesty to live ever young and prosperous, God knoweth I would. If it had been or were in my power to make you so rich as ye might enrich all men, God help me, I would do it. If it had been or were in my power to make your Majesty so puissant as all the world should be compelled to obey you, Christ he knoweth, I would.

He thinks, ten years I have had my soul flattened and pressed till it’s not the thickness of paper. Henry has ground and ground me in the mill of his desires, and now I am fined down to dust I am no more use to him, I am powder in the wind. Princes hate those to whom they have incurred debts.

For your Majesty has been most bountiful to me, and more like a dear father (your Majesty not offended) than a master.

Certain threats his father used to make ring in his ears. I’ll pound you to paste, boy, I’ll flatten you, I’ll knock you into the middle of next week.

I have committed my soul my body and goods at your Majesty’s pleasure …

Well, Henry knows that. I have nothing, that does not come from him. And no hope, but in his mercy and God’s.

Sir, as to your common wealth I have, after my wit, power and knowledge, travailed therein, having had no respect to persons (your Majesty only excepted) … but that I have done any injustice or wrong wilfully, I trust God shall bear me witness, and the world not able justly to accuse me …

It is not only kings who cannot be grateful. The fortunes he has made, the patronage he has dispensed: these count against him now, because favours that cannot be repaid eat away at the soul. Men scorn to live under an obligation. They would rather be perjurers, and sell their friends.

Brother Martin says, when you think of death, cast out fear. But perhaps that advice is easier to take if you expect to die in your bed, with a priest buzzing in your ear. Gardiner will press for heresy charges and burn him if he can. He knows about that: the green wood, the vagrant wind, and the dogs of London whimpering at the smell.

The king might grant the axe. That is the best he can hope for, unless. There is always unless. Erasmus says, ‘No man is to be despaired of, so long as the breath is in him.’

He signs off: Written with the quaking hand and most sorrowful heart of your most sorrowful subject and most humble servant and prisoner, this Saturday at your Tower of London.

He dries the ink. One cannot help but lie. His hand is not notably quaking. But it is true his heart is sorrowful. He sits with his hand to his chest, rubbing it a little. ‘Christophe,’ he says, ‘fetch in my supper. What am I having?’

‘Thank Christ! I thought you had lost your appetite. We have strawberries and cream. And the Italian merchants have sent you their sympathy and a cheese.’

The merchant Antonio Bonvisi used to send food to Thomas More, dishes fragrant with spice. But More would push them aside, and say to his servant, ‘John, can you find me a milk pudding?’

The Duke of Urbino, Federigo di Montefeltro, was asked what it took to rule a state. ‘Essere umano,’ he said: to be human. He wonders if Henry will reach the standard.

There is no reply to his letter. No direct reply, at least. Beginning early, in tender summer dawns, the interrogations proceed into the hot afternoons, when the broad light in the chamber grows dusty. Sometimes the sessions are quiet and industrious, sometimes they are more like exchanges of insults than any proceeding of state. Like Fitzwilliam, Call-Me cannot look at him. He says, ‘He did this,’ and ‘He did that,’ as if Thomas Essex were not in the room. When Gardiner graces them with his presence he is grave, dry, judicious, careful to suppress the bubbling anticipation he must feel.

The clerk Gwyn sneaks back a time or two. Norfolk does not notice him because a clerk is beneath his notice, unless he offends. The clerk entertains him – the prisoner – by sometimes casting up a glance to Heaven, or turning down his mouth in disbelief at what he must record. Till Riche bursts out, ‘I am not content with this clerk. He keeps looking at the prisoner.’

‘So do you keep looking at me,’ he says. ‘I am not content with you, Richard Riche. You speak as if I have been a traitor all the years you have known me. Where has your evidence been till now? Did it fall out through a hole in your pocket?’

Riche says, ‘It is no small thing, to indict a man so close to the king. I sought guidance. I prayed about it.’

‘And your prayers were answered?’

Riche says coldly, ‘Oh, yes.’

Once again Gwyn packs up his penknives and quills without demur, though not without a backward glance. Another clerk comes in and ahems over how to continue, until Norfolk snarls at him to start anywhere. In this way the hours pass, marked off by the bells from St Peter ad Vincula and from the city outside the walls. The questions never make more sense than they did on the first day, nor does the picture of his life ever reflect the reality as he sees it. The mirror presents an alien face, eyes askew, mouth gaping. Lord Montague, and Exeter, and Nicholas Carew suffered this estrangement from self; and Norris and George Boleyn before them. Montague had said, ‘The king never made a man but he destroyed him again.’ Why should Cromwell be an exception?

Florence made me, he thinks. London unmade me. In Florence the bell called Leone announces the dawn even to the blind. Then rings Podestà, then Popolo. At Terce, when the law courts open, Leone and Montarina summon litigants and advocates to their business.

When he was an infant, his sister Kat used to tell him the bells made the time. When the hour strikes, and the music shivers in the air, you have the best of it; and what’s left is like a sucked plumstone on the side of a plate.

Lord Audley shows his face: shifty, ashamed. I created you, Audley, he thinks. I promoted you above your deserts, to have a compliant chancellor: and you have grown rich. ‘I thought you were with me, my lord. You always posed as valiant for the gospel, but I think you were only valiant for my favour. You swore to be my friend for life.’ He adds, ‘I have it in writing.’

Fitzwilliam absents himself. Perhaps he has said to the king, I know Crumb is no traitor, I cannot do it?

‘He is busy,’ Wriothesley says.

Riche says, ‘He is appointed Lord Privy Seal in your place.’

Norfolk says, ‘There is more matter than your arrest, for trusted men to deal with. There are more men in this realm, than Cromwell.’

‘But none so necessary to the commonweal,’ he says. ‘I am surprised your son Surrey is not here to gloat.’

He thinks, if they let that spider in, I shall put my boot heel on him.

He is suspicious of Gardiner’s absence: what is he working at? Charles Brandon comes in, and confirms that Cromwell said that if he were king he would spend more time in Woking. He remembers another occasion: ‘The king gave Crumb a ring from his own finger. And Crumb said, “It fits me exactly, it needs no adjustment.”’

‘And what do you draw from that?’ he asks. ‘That I am the right size for king? What is the right size, my lord Suffolk? Are you not nearer it than me?’

He is saddened by Brandon. To Norfolk, a Cromwell is just a blot to be erased, like a discrepancy in book-keeping. But Brandon’s family made their name by audacity. He hoped there might be some fellow-feeling. Charles cannot settle to his questions, but walks about, and in time walks out of the room, calling sharply to his folk to accompany him, as one whistles to a dog.

Wriothesley says, ‘You are aware that Lord Hungerford is arrested?’

‘Hungerford?’ He thinks that, in dwelling on Brandon, he has missed something. ‘What has Hungerford to do with me?’

‘That is something we mean to find out,’ Riche says. ‘He has written you many letters, and you have written him many replies, copies of which Master Secretary Wriothesley has extracted from your files.’

Hungerford is a West Country gentleman: a good enough lieutenant, active in his district’s affairs. He is a wife-beater too, and his lady wants to be free of him; only a few days before his arrest, he, Thomas Essex, had set in train a process of official separation. He says, ‘One must use such people. The king cannot be served only by saints.’

‘An old woman has laid grave accusations against him,’ Wriothesley says. ‘She is called Mother Huntley.’

Christ help him, he thinks. We all have a Mother Huntley in our lives. Mine is called Richard Riche.

‘The charges involve sorcery,’ Norfolk says. ‘Well, Cromwell here, he knows all about that! Conjurers’ books in his cellar, were there not? When the wax doll was found, of our little prince, Cromwell could not wait to lay his hands on the culprits and their villain texts. And yet he told young Richmond, God rest him, that there were no such things as witches! When we all know that witches have done the king harm.’

‘I remember that day,’ Riche said. ‘It was at St James’s, at the time Fitzroy fell ill. Cromwell sent me out of the room, and I often wondered what passed. That is how it has always been – Wriothesley, you will bear me out? He seems to confide in you, then suddenly excludes you from his councils.’

‘Now we see why,’ Wriothesley says.

‘However, to the matter in hand,’ Riche says. ‘Lord Hungerford has employed a conjurer to find out the date of the king’s death.’

He thinks, Henry does not fear a false horoscope. He fears a true one: a fate that he must walk towards. He says, ‘A man like Hungerford makes enemies among his neighbours. It is an easy thing to allege.’

‘Do not take it lightly,’ Lord Audley says. ‘I assure you, the king does not.’

Hungerford may be a brute, but he is hardly a danger to the commonweal. Two weeks ago he would have been sweeping such charges off his desk and onto some lesser desk.

Riche says, ‘He is also charged with violating a member of his household. Per anum.’

‘God save us – not Lady Hungerford?’

‘A servant,’ Norfolk says. ‘Luckily his own, not some other gentleman’s. He will die for it.’

‘But more to the point,’ Wriothesley says, ‘he is detected as a papist. A chaplain in his household had contact with the rebels in the north. We have it documented.’

‘Why did you not know?’ Riche says.

‘Because he lied to me?’ he says. ‘If I could detect every lie, I could set up in a temple as an oracle.’ He pictures himself in an olive grove. ‘Far away from you.’

It is past dinner time and he is hungry. The duke is hungry too, but those days are gone when they might have shared a table. Christophe comes in with a chicken. A half-hour passes, in which he eats heartily enough. When his guests return, Riche follows the others with an affected dawdle that means he has something to say. He takes time in setting his papers down, squaring them up. ‘Wyatt is much enriched.’

‘Yes?’

‘He is granted land from Reading Abbey. From Boxley and Malling. And here in London, St Mary Overy, and the Crossed Friars, and St Saviour in Bermondsey.’

‘He has long coveted those properties.’

Riche smiles. ‘I believe he has more than he thought he would get.’

‘He will take it as a challenge. He will soon run through the income, believe me.’

Wriothesley leans forward. His face is flushed. ‘My lord, do you not ask yourself, why now? It is done by his Majesty’s direct command. He finds Wyatt deserves well.’

As he did at Anne Boleyn’s fall. ‘Well,’ he says, ‘what is unlucky for others is lucky for Thomas Wyatt. God smiles on him.’

Wriothesley mutters, ‘Again, ask yourself why.’

‘Is that a question?’

Wriothesley is mute.

He, Lord Cromwell, turns to Riche. ‘No man knows better than you that grants like these are not made by snapping the fingers. Wyatt’s grants were set in train months ago, when I recalled him from his embassy. They needed only the king’s signature.’

‘He could have withheld it,’ Wriothesley says, ‘if Wyatt did not please him. Clearly he did.’

Of course Wyatt would be questioned: how not? It seems he has given answers, helpful or at least not disagreeable to the king. But under what constraint, under what pressure? Perhaps Bess is having another phantom child?

‘Wyatt knows your secret dealings,’ Wriothesley says. ‘And, as he has often boasted, the thoughts of your heart.’

‘Not that they are anything to boast about,’ he says. ‘You strain my charity, Wriothesley. Still, when I am set at large, I will try not to hold these things against you.’

Once again that fluttering, behind his ribs, of the organ whose workings have cost Wyatt himself so much pain. Love slayeth my heart. Fortune is depriver of all my comfort … My pleasant days, they fleet away and pass, But daily yet the ill doth change into the worse.

He says – the words emerge suddenly, unguarded – ‘What will you do without me? When a man such as Wyatt goes to work, he works for those who appreciate him. Without me you will read the lines as written, but you will never read between them. Marillac will make fools of you, and Chapuys too, if he returns. Charles and François will scramble your brains like a basin of eggs. Within a year the king will be fighting the Scots, or the French, or likely both, and he will bankrupt us. None of you can manage matters as I can. And the king will quarrel with you all, and you with each other. A year from now, if you sacrifice me, you will have neither honest coin nor honest minister.’

The clerk says, ‘Lord Cromwell is ill. We should perhaps pause?’

He turns his eyes on the boy. ‘Bless you for your courage.’

He is sweating. Norfolk says, ‘Oh, I think he is fit enough. It is not as if he has endured any pains – which are spared him, at the king’s direction, even though he is not nobly born.’

So the day passes, and another. Treason can be construed from any scrap of paper, if the will is there. A syllable will do it. The power is in the hands of the reader, not the writer. The duke continues with his outbursts, and Riche with insinuations that seldom connect one line of questioning with another. Mostly he can answer them; sometimes he has to refer them to the papers they have impounded, or lost. The truth is, as he confesses, he has meddled in so much of the king’s business, that it is impossible even for a man of his capacity to recollect everything said and done. ‘It is hard to live under the law,’ he says. ‘A minister must, unwittingly, transgress at divers points. But if I am a traitor,’ he wipes his face, ‘then all the devils in Hell confound me and the vengeance of God light upon me.’

Left alone at the end of the afternoon, he sits unpicking the fabric of the recent past, and always the thread leads him back to May Day. Thomas Essex at Greenwich, coming and going from the tournament ground, clerks following him with the king’s business; the earl – that is, myself – throwing out a command here and there. Richard Cromwell in the arena, knocking down all comers. Our feasting of our friends and enemies, our style and courtesy, our sprezzatura, our lavish display: May Day undid us, for the envy and rancour it bred could no longer be suppressed. Richard has compounded with some Italians to paint a mural of his triumph in his house at Hinchingbrooke; they mean to decorate the whole room. The time may come when the scene is bitter in his eyes, but he should paint it anyway. He should not give backword to the Italians – it is how they get their living.

Within nine days of his arrest, they have put together enough matter against him to bring a bill of attainder into Parliament. They question him about religion, in order to add further charges. They ask about what he did in Calais, who he protected there. They delve further into their cache of forgeries, out of which they can adduce what they like. Norfolk says to him, ‘When Mr Wriothesley went through Antwerp on the king’s business, you gave him messages for heretics.’

‘I gave him a message for my daughter. My own blood.’

Norfolk says, ‘You think that makes it better?’

He says, once again, ‘Let me see the king.’

Norfolk says, ‘Never.’

He supposes that Henry, for an hour or two together, believes firmly in both his heresy and his treason. But surely he cannot sustain the delusion? For the rest of his hours, he does not care what is true. He cultivates his grudge and grievance. No councillor can ever placate him, assuage this sense of grievance, slake his thirst or satisfy his hunger.

Before he has been a week in prison, Rafe brings him word of how the Emperor received the news. Charles seemed dumbfounded, dispatches say. ‘What?’ he asked. ‘Cremuel? Are you sure? In the Tower? And by the king’s command?’

One day the door opens; he expects Gardiner but it is Brandon again. Charles sits down, sighing heavy, on a little upholstered stool, so his knees rise absurdly under his chin. ‘Why doesn’t your lordship take this chair?’

But Charles sits like a penitent, puffing and sighing and looking around the room. His eyes search the painted walls, those scenes of paradises, verdant hills and brooks: ‘Is she behind there? The other one?’

‘Not in her own person, my lord. She lies in the chapel, at rest. As for the picture, I painted her out.’

‘What? Personally?’

‘No, my lord. I had a professional do it.’

He pictures himself, sneaking by night with a huge obliterating brush. ‘You’re a good fellow, Charles,’ he says. ‘I’d rob a house with you, if I had to.’

Brandon grins behind his big beard. ‘Have you robbed many houses?’

‘In my wild days, you know.’

‘We all had those,’ Charles says.

‘I wouldn’t rob a house with the king. You’d say to him, “Stand there and whistle if the watch comes,” and at the first footfall he’d scramble off and leave you to it, your leg over the sill.’

‘I don’t think he’d go robbing, in all conscience,’ Charles says. ‘He’d be breaching his own peace, wouldn’t he? And who would he rob? He can distrain our goods if he likes, and pauperise us all.’ He rubs his forehead. ‘I’m glad to hear you make a jest, Crumb. Look here …’ He levers himself to the vertical. ‘Look here, and this is my advice. Confess you are a heretic. Claim you have been misled. Ask Harry to see you face to face and reason with you, to bring you back to true religion. He’d like that, wouldn’t he? You remember how he enjoyed himself, at the trial of that fellow Lambert? Sitting above the court, all arrayed in white?’

‘Lambert was burned,’ he says.

Charles is deflated. ‘Well, that was my idea, and now I’ve delivered it, so I …’ He heads for the door, plunges back. ‘Your hand?’

He gives it. Charles pummels his shoulder, as if they were watching a dog fight.

When Brandon has gone he thinks, he is right, Henry would take pleasure in converting me. But there is a reason why Charles’s solution will not answer. His enemies will show (to their own satisfaction) that he denies the Eucharist, and no heretic of that sort can save himself, even by recantation. What condemns him is the first of those pernicious articles they passed through Parliament last year when he was sick. His Italian fever is killing him after all.

The bill of attainder has its second reading on 29 June. Between the first reading of the bill and its second, between the second and the third, he is a dying man. When the bill passes, then by law he is dead. The only thing uncertain is by what process they will make him a corpse. If the king prefers to punish him for heresy, he will die by fire, perhaps beside Robert Barnes and his friends; if for treason, then likely enough he will go to Tyburn, to be cut up alive. Even the bugger Hungerford will get such grace as the headsman offers, but he, God knows. He dreams he is facing a door painted scarlet, or not painted but bathed in scarlet, and the wall is the same hue; the surface is wet, the floor, the wall, and the room behind the door is wet and scarlet too.

It has stopped raining. Looking out from his windows in the queen’s lodging, he can see the summer dying back. He remembers the whole world a-swill, in those years before the cardinal came down. He remembers fetching Rafe to the house at Fenchurch Street, and how he dripped on the floor, and Lizzie unwrapped him from his layers. He thinks, she died before I had anything. I had Austin Friars, but it was a lawyer’s house. When I was the cardinal’s man she never saw me for weeks on end. I might as well have been a sailor on the sea. She stood at the head of the stairs, wearing her white cap. She said, ‘Let me know when you are coming home.’ I wrote my will, after she was dead, and what I had to leave to my son, in those days, was six hundred pounds and twelve silver spoons.

On the day the bill of attainder passes, Stephen Gardiner comes back. He wraps his coat around himself as if he is chilly. ‘I have come to ask you about the king’s so-called marriage.’

The turn of phrase is enough to make him understand what is required. ‘I will write it all down for you. From the beginning.’

‘Omit nothing,’ Gardiner says. ‘From your first negotiations with Cleves to the night of the supposed marriage. You must set forth all you heard of the lady’s pre-contract with Lorraine, and record faithfully what you know of the king’s dislike of and unwillingness to the marriage.’

He raises an eyebrow. Gardiner says, ‘Lady Rochford and others will testify that there was no consummation. The doctors will confirm it. If she came here a maid, she leaves as one, as the king – entertaining doubts that the match was valid – refrained himself from carnal copulation.’

He thinks, I could be like George Boleyn: I could set down such matter as would raise blisters on Henry’s face. But I have a son, and two grandsons, and a nephew, and my nephew has heirs. George had no children. He says, ‘Getting a new wife was always my task. It falls to you now, does it? I suppose it will be Norfolk’s niece? What has happened to the queen?’

‘The lady of Cleves has already left the court. The king has sent her to Richmond. He has promised to join her there. But of course, he will not. It was necessary to stop her womanish lamentation – or at least, to allow it to go on at a distance.’

He thinks, she must have been frightened, poor soul. And no one to look to her welfare. ‘I suppose money will salve the smart.’

‘There will be a settlement. I will come to that. The annulment comes first. The king says, Cromwell knows more of the matter than any man, except my own self. You must write the truth on the damnation of your soul. You will be required to take an oath.’

‘Why would I refuse?’ he says. ‘I would also take an oath I am a true servant and that my faith is the catholic and universal faith, not varying from that professed by the king. It were strange if my word should hold good in the one matter, but not the other.’

‘You are a dying man,’ Gardiner says. ‘They are known not to lie. Do you want me to send Sadler, to help you write?’

He does not want Rafe to see him do this last act. He thinks, the annulment will annul me. ‘I know what is required,’ he says coldly. ‘Leave it with me, my lord bishop. Now kick yourself out.’

He sits down. The facts marshal themselves in his mind, the phrases form themselves in order, but before he can write, he sheds a tear and thinks, I am in mourning for myself: with these papers, my usefulness gone. I could not do it again: the years of sleepless toil, the brute moral deformation, the axe-work. When Henry dies and goes to judgement, he must answer for me, as for all his servants: he must account for what he did to Cromwell. I never strove to replace him. All over England there are standing stones, petrified forms of men who hoped to rule: Stick stock stone, As King of England I be known. For their presumption they are condemned to stand for a thousand years, two thousand, in wind and rain; around them are smaller stones, the forms of the wretches who were their knights. Count them and – by a peculiar enchantment – you never get the same number twice. The destruction goes beyond counting. It goes beyond what the pen can record.

His narrative is the work of many hours. Sometimes Christophe comes in and peers at him, and offers a dish of raspberries, or wafers, or comfits. But he is absorbed in his story: Rochester, the bull-baiting, the lady from Cleves at the casement; the king blustering and hot in his disguise as English gentleman. The play at Greenwich, where the Romans tottered and fell; the king abed, kneading his bride’s belly and breasts.

Sometimes his mind drifts away, as it must: far from this room, beyond the city walls, across the fields and into the forest. The cover is dense, as in the years before trees were cut down for houses and ships, and all the creatures now extinct are alive again, for good or ill: the beaver in the stream, the wolf gaining on you with his long stride. When a man does not know which path to take he scatters crumbs from the loaf he carries in his hand, but the birds swoop behind him and eat them. He takes off his shirt and tears it into strips, and ties a strip to a branch at each fork in the road, but the ogres who live deep in the wood tread after him and steal the linen to bind their wounds: for ogres are always fighting. He labours on, and talking trees snigger about him, hiding their expressions of contempt behind their leaves.

When his tale is done he writes the superscription: To the king, my most gracious sovereign lord his royal Majesty.

But he cannot think how to end it. It may be the last letter they will allow. So he writes I cry for mercy. He writes it again, in case Henry should be distracted: mercy. And once again, mercy, to get it into the royal skull, to pierce the royal heart.

He has dated it: Wednesday, the last day of June. With heavy heart and trembling hand.

This time it is true. It is trembling. He looks at it as if it is some other man’s hand. Of all the words he has written, will this plea endure? Rats have eaten the laws of ancient times. They relish fish-glue and vellum; anything that was once alive, they will eat it, and then out of habit, they will eat what is dead; from the margins they chew their way in, to the secret history of England. It is the glory of the men who have worked with Cromwell that instead of merely cursing the vermin they have patched, they have mended, they have stretched a point to replace a gnawed vowel; they have been ready to substitute a digested phrase with a clause that will help the crown. But what has it availed? He has lived by the laws he has made and must be content to die by them. But the law is not an instrument to find out truth. It is there to create a fiction that will help us move past atrocious acts and face our future. It seems there is no mercy in this world, but a kind of haphazard justice: men pay for crimes, but not necessarily their own.

Rafe comes to take the letter. He has no seal, so he folds it, and before he gives it over he hesitates, trapping it under his palm. ‘I always told Henry, frightening people is cheap but it doesn’t get the best results. If you want a prisoner to yield you everything, offer him hope.’

Rafe says, ‘I have read how the philosopher Canius, when Caligula’s hangmen came for him, they found him playing chess. He said to them, “Mark this, I am winning – count my pieces on the board.”’

‘I make no such bold reply,’ he says sadly. ‘Canius still had his queen.’ He pushes the letter across the table. ‘Here. Everything he wants is in that package. Will Cleves make war on us now?’

Rafe says, ‘It appears the duke is content to leave his sister here in England. And if she does not oppose him in anything, the king will make her fair and honourable terms.’

‘Why would she oppose him? Poor lady.’ To make a winter journey, he thinks, and find herself unwanted at the end of it.

Rafe says, ‘Duke Wilhelm is talking to the French. Word is they have offered him a princess, and an alliance.’

‘Ah, so he is not marrying Christina?’

‘No, he cannot make terms with the Emperor, or not at this time. They say the French princess is unwilling.’

Unwilling. That will leave room for an annulment, when the Emperor offers something better. ‘Wilhelm has not done badly out of us,’ he says. ‘Better than Anna.’ He thinks, I doubt she will want to marry any other man, now Henry has mauled her.

Rafe says, ‘The French swear they will carry their princess to the altar, if need be. She is only twelve years old, so she cannot weigh heavy.’ He sighs. ‘Helen, sir, begs to be commended to you. She prays night and morning for you. As do our little children, and all your friends.’

Not a great number of prayers, then, to bowl at Heaven’s door. Though he can count on some from the Archbishop of Canterbury, and surely his requests roll in like thunder. And Robert Barnes is praying for me, and I for Robert Barnes. Neither of us has much to ask for now, but courage. As Wyatt writes, Lauda finem: praise the end.

Edmund Walsingham, the Lieutenant of the Tower, comes next day. ‘Do not be alarmed, my lord. I bring no bad news. Only that you must move house.’

So his interrogators are done with him. ‘Where am I going?’

‘The Bell Tower, sir, next my lodging.’

‘I am familiar with it,’ he says dryly. ‘Can I not go to the Beauchamp Tower?’

‘Occupied, my lord.’

‘Christophe,’ he says, ‘pack my books. Send to Austin Friars for warmer clothes for me, the walls are thick there.’ He says to the lieutenant, ‘When Thomas More was held in the Bell Tower, he was allowed to walk in your garden. Shall I have that liberty?’

‘No, my lord.’

Walsingham is a tight-lipped Flodden veteran. He has been in his post fifteen years, and has no intention of making a slip-up now.

‘More was not locked in. Shall I be locked in?’

‘Yes, my lord.’

He puts his coat on. ‘Allons.’ He says his goodbyes to the goddesses; a last flitting glance over his shoulder. No trace of Anne Boleyn. He remembers her saying – was it in this very room? – ‘Be good to me.’ He thinks, if I see her again, perhaps this time I will.

Out into the open air. He looks about him. All he can see is armed men. The lieutenant says, ‘I trust the guard will not disturb you.’

A breath of the river air. A dance of green leaves. He feels the sun on his shoulder. A workman sitting on scaffolding, whistling, his shirt off; ‘The Jolly Forester’ … He feels netted by the past, suspended in some high blue instant, strung up in air. By noon the forester will be scorched.

I have been a foster long and many day,

My locks ben hore.

I shall hang up my horn by the greenwood spray:

Foster will I be no more.

The walk is too brief. ‘Shall I go to the lower chamber or the upper?’

When he had arrived at the Tower, they had fired the cannon: it is the custom, when a personage is brought in. The ground quakes, the river boils, and inside the accused, as he steps onto the wharf, his marrow wobbles, his spleen protests, the chambers of his skull rattle. On the threshold of the Bell Tower, on the ascending stair, he feels again this deep agitation. It is a weakness, but he will not show it to the lieutenant: just steadies himself with a brush of his fingertips against the wall.

All the while that my bow I bend,

Shall I wed no wife:

I shall build me a bower at the greenwood’s end

Thereto lead my life.

The doors are opened into the lower room. It is a stony, vaulted and spacious chamber. The fireplace is empty and swept clean. The walls here are twelve feet thick, and light falls from windows set high above the head. There is a figure sitting at the table. Silently he asks, ‘Is it you?’ Thomas More rises from his place, crosses the room and melts into the wall.

‘Martin, is it you? You look well. How’s my god-daughter?’

The turnkey takes off his cap. He’d been about to say, sorry to see you here, sir: the usual empty formula; best pre-empt that. ‘Five now, sir, and a good little soul, bless you for asking. No harm in her.’

No harm? What strange things people say. ‘Is she learning her letters?’

‘A girl, sir? Only gets them into trouble.’

‘You don’t want her to read the gospel?’

‘She can marry a man who will read it for her. Can I fetch you anything?’

‘Is Lord Lisle still here?’

‘I couldn’t say.’

‘The old lady? Margaret Pole?’

It has occurred to him that Henry might execute Margaret, now he is not standing by to stay his hand. ‘Very well,’ he says to Martin. ‘You have orders not to talk, I understand that. Do you think I could have a fire lit?’

‘I’ll see to it,’ Martin says. ‘You always did feel the cold. I remember when you used to come in and sit with Thomas More. You’d say to him, “We should have a fire.” He’d say, “I can’t afford it, Thomas.” You’d say, “Christ save us, I’ll pay for the fire – will you stop trying to wring my bloody heart? You may be a papist but you’re not a pauper.”’

‘Did I?’ He is amazed. ‘Did I say that? My bloody heart?’

‘More, he would get you all of a wamble,’ Martin says. ‘When they rang the curfew, he’d come in from the garden and he’d sit down and write all night. He’d sit at that very table, wrapped in a sheet. It was like a winding sheet – the sight would turn me cold. Myself, I never saw hair of him, not since that day he was led away. But some claim they have. And as I am alive and a Christian man, you will hear the old fellow overhead, Fisher. You hear him dragging himself across the floor.’

‘You shouldn’t believe in ghosts,’ he says uncertainly.

‘I don’t,’ Martin says. ‘But who are they to care, if I believe in them or not? You listen out tonight. You can hear old Fisher shuffle across, and then the chair scrape, where he rests his weight on the back of it.’

‘There was no weight to rest,’ he says. The bishop was so thin that you couldn’t use him to stop a draught. What can you do with a man who, when he sat down to dine, would set a skull on the table, where other people would have the salt pot?

‘Your boy can sleep in here on a pallet,’ Martin says, ‘if you don’t like to sit up on your own.’

‘Sit up? I’ll sleep. I always sleep. Martin, if my son Gregory were brought here as prisoner, or Sir Richard Cromwell, you would tell me?’

Martin scrapes his foot along the floor. ‘Aye, I would. I would try to get you word.’

There are old rush mats underfoot. He thinks, I will get something better sent from home: if anything is left.

It is a chamber for a favoured prisoner, but there is no mistaking it for an ordinary room. Still, the night passes without incident. He listens out for Fisher but the old bishop is nodding. He wakes once and thinks, kings may repent, there are examples. For a while his mind goes round and round, seeking one. The chroniclers tell us that in the reign of the third Henry, the king punished his servant Hubert de Burgh, Earl of Kent, starving him out of sanctuary and throwing him into a deep dungeon. Hubert lived two years in irons, before he escaped and got his earldom back.

With the morning Rafe comes. ‘So, my letter, how did he receive it?’

Rafe’s movements are slow; he looks as though he has been at work through the night. He wants to call for a cup of ale for him, but Rafe says, no, no, I must tell you what passed. ‘The king turned out his councillors. And then he caused me to read your letter out loud.’

‘That must have taken you some time.’

‘When I had done he said, “Read it again, Sadler.” I said, “The whole, sir?” He hesitated and said, “No, you may omit the story of the marriage. Read where he makes his pleas.”

‘The second time I read it, he seemed much moved. I did not want to break his train of thought, but then I dared to say, “It takes but one word, sir.” He looked at me: “One word to do what?” He took my meaning, of course and I dared not venture further. Then he said, “Yes, I could free Cromwell, could I not? I could restore him tomorrow.”

‘I said, “The French would be amazed, sir” – thinking to prompt him, because you always counselled him, do what your enemy likes least.’

‘But I think the French are not the enemy,’ he says. ‘Since about last week.’

‘But then the king said, “You know, he has never forgiven me for Wolsey, and I have long wondered, to what extremity will sorrow lead him? Even when my son Richmond lay dying, he was pestering the physicians with his enquiries. Bishop Gardiner says, the cardinal himself might forgive, but the cardinal’s man never will.”

‘I said, “Sir, I swear it, the earl is reconciled. He has let the cardinal go.” But he cut me off. He said, “Here in my writing box I have his earlier letter.” He turned the key and took it out and gave it to me in my hand. He said, “Read this one. Read where it says he would make me live ever young.” I did so. The king said, “He cannot, can he?” I would swear, sir, that tears stood in his eyes. My heart beat fast, I thought, he will utter now: “Let Essex go.” But he got up and walked to the window. He said, “Thank you for your patience, Master Secretary.” I said, “I was well-trained, sir, by a patient man.” He said, “Now you can leave me.”’

‘You did well, Rafe. You did more than I had any right to expect.’

Rafe says, ‘When I was a little child you brought me on a journey. You set me by the fire and said, this is where you live now, we will be good to you, never fear. I had left my mother that day and I did not know where I was, and I had never seen London, still less your house, but I never cried, did I?’

He cries now, like an angry baby, in the ungraceful way that red-haired people do: his skin flushing, his body trembling. ‘Where in the name of God is Cranmer?’ he says. ‘Where is Wyatt? Where is Edward Seymour? They will be ashamed for the term of their lives.’

‘Cranmer will live past this,’ he says. ‘I do not say he will sleep well at night, but he will survive. And Wyatt will write a verse about me. And Seymour must live to guide the little prince, when he, when Henry –’ He will not say it. The thought has entered his mind before now: what if a fever rises this very night, what if he coughs and strains to breathe, what if his lungs fill with water again and the poison from his leg kills him? Then the state will hold its breath. The executive arm will suspend its action, even though the knife is raised. The prince will need me. The council will need me. Edward Seymour will turn the key and let me go.

When Rafe goes out, he tells Christophe, ‘Get a pack of cards.’ He shows him the painted queen, shuffles and lays out three. ‘Now, where is she?’

Christophe’s stubby finger descends.

‘No.’ He turns the card up. ‘Now, watch me, I am teaching you this trick. So if you are ever without money or food, the lady will provide.’ He says softly, ‘It is only if the worst should befall. You will go to Gregory. Or Master Richard will take you in. Tell them I say to get you a wife, to save you from sin.’

He is working on how to save his household staff. Some will go to Gregory, others to Richard – presuming the king does not strip the Cromwells of all they have. Wyatt will take his pick, now he is moneyed and has several properties to staff. He thinks, Brandon will want my huntsmen, my dog-keepers. Some merchant in the city, who knew his father, will take Dick Purser. The Italian merchants will covet my cooks. Young Mathew can go back to Wolf Hall, though his French will be wasted in Wiltshire. Back in April, when he had thought he would fall any moment, he had called together the singing children from his chapel; he had thanked them for their services, wished them good luck in their lives, and sent them home to their parents, each with a present of twenty pounds. Once he was made earl he thought, shall I recall them? Now he is glad he did not.

In Italy, when he was working for the bankers, he learned the art of memory, and has practised it through his life since. You make an image for each memory and leave them in the churches you frequent, in the streets you walk, on the banks of the river you sail. You leave them in ditches, between the furrows of a field, and hanging from trees: crossbows and skillets, dragons and stars. When you run out of real places you dream up more; you design islands, like Utopia.

Now, sensing he has less than a week to live, he must pick up his images from where he has left them, walking his own inner terrain. He must traverse his whole life, waking and sleeping: you cannot leave your memories alone in this world, for other men to own.

In the dusk the cardinal returns, as a disturbance in his vision. ‘Where have you been?’ he asks him.

‘I don’t know, Thomas.’ The old man sounds forlorn. ‘I’d tell you if I could.’

Offered a chair, he looks at it, averse. ‘I won’t sit where Thomas More sat. For what that ingrate did to me, I will never pass the time of day with him. If I smell him these days, I go the other way.’

He says, ‘Sir, you know I did not betray you? Despite what your daughter thinks?’

Wolsey paces, dragging his scarlet. At last he says, ‘Well, Thomas … I dare say … women get things wrong.’

His great fatigue, which had lifted when he was facing Gardiner or Norfolk every day, now returns. The feeling around his heart – that it is crushed, forced out of shape – he now understands as a deformity caused by grief. He feels he is dragging corpses, shovelling them up: Robert Aske, Tom Truth, Harry Norris and Will Brereton, little Francis Weston and Mark Smeaton with his lute. And even those in whose death no one can say he took a hand: Jane the queen, Harry Percy, Thomas Boleyn.

His mind turns over the questions that have been put to him, as if the interrogations were still going on. He thinks about Richard Riche: ‘In June 1535, the prisoner said to me, “Richard, when the reign of King Cromwell dawns, you shall be a duke.”’

And Audley saying, faintly, ‘Riche, we cannot put that in the record. I think my lord was making a joke.’

He recalls Wriothesley, his outburst one afternoon: ‘He thought he was king already. He acted like a king. I remember when French merchants came to Greenwich, the year of the ice. They had goods they pressed on his Majesty, and his Majesty put them off, saying he had spent all his money fighting the Pilgrims. But then, seeing their distress and their journey wasted, he graciously agreed to purchases. But my lord Privy Seal forced them out of the king’s chambers and compounded a bargain with them, making them sell him at a lower price those goods that were intended for the king.’

He recalls that day: the ice-light in the chamber, the enticements laid before Henry: a velvet dog collar, a pair of strawberry sleeves and, for him, Lord Cromwell, the murrey-colour silk. Call-Me said, ‘Be careful sir.’ He remembers the strain on Call-Me’s face. He didn’t think he meant, be careful of me.

Edmund Walsingham comes in every day or so, and stays only long enough to witness his prisoner is still sound in mind and limb: it is as if he fears conversation will contaminate him. Kingston has his duties as councillor, and is at the Tower only on days of portent. So he has no one to talk to, except Christophe and his turnkey and the dead; and with daylight the ghosts melt away. You can hear a sigh, a soufflation, as they disperse themselves. They become a whistling draught, a hinge that wants oil; they subside into natural things, a vagrant mist, a coil of smoke from a dying fire.

He lives in dread that the king will stop Rafe’s visits. But it appears that the king still wishes him to have some news. Lord Hungerford is under sentence of death, Rafe says. ‘The French ambassador is spreading the rumour he has raped his daughter. But no such charge has been brought. There is enough with the sorcery and the sodomy.’

‘Marillac is emboldened,’ he says, ‘after all the rumours he has spread about me. There seem to be no consequences.’

He cannot find it in his heart to be sorry for Hungerford: except he is sorry for any confined creature, who knows his next outing will be his death. He would like Wolsey to come in so they could have a game of chess: though you should never play chess with a prelate, they always have a pawn in their sleeves. He craves the sight of Thomas More, with his grey stubble of beard and his tired eyes, sitting at the table as he used to do: that table which had taken on the aspect of an altar, the candle flame tugged by a draught. In the wet spring of 1535, More had a trick of absenting himself from the scene, so that what sat before you appeared already dead, a carcass, like the silvery corpse that you find in a spider’s web when the spider has died at home.

They speak of More as a martyr now, instead of a man who miscalculated the odds. He had said to Chapuys, More thought he could manipulate Henry, and perhaps he was right; but then he met what he had not reckoned on, he met Anne Boleyn. We councillors think we are men of vision and learning, we gravely delineate our position, set forth our plans and argue our case far into the night. Then some little girl sweeps through and upsets the candle and sets fire to our sleeve; leaves us slapping ourselves like madmen, trying to save our skin. It rankles with me, that some sneak thief like Riche should best me; that a fool like Polo should hole my boat, and a dolt like Lisle should drown me. Perhaps some people will say I have died for the gospel, as More died for the Pope. But most will not think me a martyr for anything, except the great cause of getting on in life.

By mid-month, the king is a single man again. Convocation first, then Parliament has acted to free him. Anna has agreed to everything proposed to her, and given back her wedding ring. Rafe says, ‘Parliament will petition the king to marry again. For the safety and comfort of the realm. However disinclined he feels, personally.’ He sighs. Master Secretary’s chain weighs heavy.

No rain falls. The heat does not falter. It seems Henry means to kill his slave through sheer disuse. The Visconti in Milan devised a torture regime that lasted for forty days, and on the fortieth day, though not before, the prisoner died. On the first day, you might cut off the man’s ear. Next day he rests. On the third day, gouge out an eye. He rests; he has another eye, but he does not know when you will choose to blind him. On day five, you will begin to tear off his skin in strips. This is not for any information he might give you. This is merely to make a spectacle, to overawe the city.

The third week in July his interrogators return, bringing fresh charges of corruption. There is a case that has been dragging on two years now, about a ship belonging to the brother of the Constable of France. He has the facts in his head, and he is sure he is clear in the matter, but he sees there is no defence against the version the French present. François is intent on hurrying him to the scaffold. ‘I don’t die quick enough for his liking,’ he says to Gardiner.

‘I doubt it will be long now,’ the bishop says. ‘Any day now the king will sign your attainder into law. Parliament will be rising. His Majesty will want to leave London for the summer.’

‘How is Norfolk’s niece?’

Gardiner looks gloomy. ‘Very pleased with her great fortune. A giddy little creature. Still, not for me to question the king’s choice.’

‘Bear that in mind,’ he says, ‘and you’ll go far, boy.’ He smiles. ‘Of course she is giddy. What else, at that age? You would not want her to think too much. History is against her.’

Gardiner looks pensive: ‘I fear it’s against us all.’

It is a busy day at the Bell Tower; Norfolk comes after, with more papers about the French ship. ‘You are to write to the council about it.’

‘Not to the king himself?’

‘Write by all means. I do suppose, though, he will be too occupied with my niece to read it.’

‘Has he said how I am to die, my lord?’

Norfolk does not answer. ‘My son Surrey says, if you had been left to run your course, you would have left no nobleman alive. He says, now is Cromwell stricken by his own staff. Now it is with him as it has been with many a man who has crossed him, both simple and grand.’

‘I do not dispute it,’ he says. ‘But it might give my lord Surrey pause, to imagine how he would order himself were he to find himself a prisoner here. Fortune and the king have raised him high, but he should not trust to that, the ground beneath our feet is slippery.’

‘I’ll tell him,’ Norfolk says. ‘By God, you wax sententious! Wise men have no need of such warnings. They wash their eyes clean every day. You think the king ever loved you? No. To him you were an instrument. As I am. A device. You and me, my son Surrey, we are no more to him than a trebuchet, a catapult, or any other engine of war. Or a dog. A dog who has served him through the hunting season. What do you do with a dog, when the season ends? You hang it.’

Norfolk ambles out. He can hear him talking to Martin outside the door, but he cannot make out what he says. ‘Christophe,’ he calls. ‘Paper and ink.’

Christophe is surprised. ‘Once again?’

He writes to the council. He denies he profited from the misfortune of the constable’s brother or his ship. Norfolk knows, he writes, he was present when the matter was aired; Fitzwilliam knows about it, and Bishop Bonner, he was envoy in France, he will remember the whole affair. For an hour, thinking and writing, he is taken out of himself, as if he were back at the council board. Straight away, he begins a letter to Henry. He has a good deal to say, but he knows that if the letter strays outside the conventions of supplication, Henry will not be able to hear it – not three times, not even once. Is it possible for a man to abase himself more than he has already? By mid-afternoon, he is weary. He gives it up. He puts down the pen and allows his mind to range. Chapuys is back in London, reappointed ambassador. Back at the old game, he thinks. Henry makes a bow to the French, then a genuflection to the Emperor. The cardinal would recognise it all.

That night when Wolsey comes blinking in, he says to him, ‘Be my good father. Stay with me till this is over.’

‘I’d like to stay,’ the old man says, ‘but I don’t know if I have the strength.’ He seems, muttering in the corner, to be preoccupied with his own end. He talks about the candles around his deathbed, George Cavendish gripping his hand. He describes the drawn faces of the monks at Leicester Abbey, peering down at him. He talks of his hasty burial, which he seems to know all about. ‘Why do I not have my right tomb,’ he says, ‘when I paid so much to that Italian of yours? Where are my great candlesticks? My dancing angels, where did they go?’

Martin, out of his charity, comes to sit with him. In More’s last days, the gaoler says, he talked a lot – he always did talk, just not when you wanted him to. He would talk of when he was a little boy, a scholar at St Anthony’s school. He would bear his satchel down West Cheap towards Threadneedle Street. On a winter’s morning at six o’clock, the streets were lit only by the frost on the cobblestones. St Anthony’s pigs, they called them, those little schoolfellows; by lantern light they assembled to chant their Latin.

‘Did he ever talk about Lambeth, about the palace?’

‘What, Archbishop Cranmer? He hated him.’

‘I mean, Lambeth in Morton’s day, when we were young. Thomas More was there as a boy, getting ready for Oxford, day after day at his books. Did he mention me?’

‘You? What had you to do with it, sir?’

He smiles. ‘I was there too.’

Uncle John says, ‘See the trays? That’s the young gentlemen’s suppers. They’re all studying hard, so if they wake up in the night, they’re turning over in their head a hard problem about Pythagoras, or St Jerome. And it makes them peckish. So they need a little bite of bread in their cupboards, and a measure of small beer. Now, boy, you know the third staircase? Up the top there’s Master Thomas More. He don’t like disturbing, so you creep in like a mouse. If he looks up you make your reverence. If he don’t you just creep out again, and not so much as a “Bless you.” Have you got that?’

He’s got it. He’s got the tray in his grasp, and he sets off on the sturdy legs that would make you think he was well-fed. What if he sat down on the bottom step, and ate the bread and drank the beer himself? Would he hear in the night Master More crying out with pangs in his belly? ‘Oh, feed me, feed me,’ he whimpers in a pitiful voice, as he mounts. ‘Oh, St Jerome, feed me!’

On the top step, the devil enters into him. He kicks open the door and bawls, ‘Master Thomas More!’

The young scholar looks up. His expression is mild and curious but he circles his book with his arm as if to protect it.

‘Master Thomas More, his supper!’

He rams it in the corner cupboard. ‘Hinge wants oiling,’ he says. ‘I’ll be back tomorrow and see to that.’ He creaks it to and fro, so it makes a double squeak. He wants to ask, what’s Pythagoras, is it an animal, is it a disease, is it a shape you can draw?

‘Master Thomas More, God bless him!’ he shouts. ‘Good night!’

He is about to slam the door when Master More calls, ‘Child?’ He intrudes himself back into the room. Master More sits blinking at him. He is fourteen, fifteen, skinny. Walter would laugh him out of the yard. Master More says softly, ‘If I gave you a penny, would you not do that, another night?’

He bounces down the stair richer. He bounces on every tread, and whistles. Fair’s fair. He was only paid to be quiet in the room, not quiet outside it. Master More will have to dig deeper into his pocket if he wants to live in the silence of the tomb. He runs away, towards his football game.

After that, every night he would lurk on the stair like a demon, till More thought the danger was passed. Then he’d burst in, bellowing ‘How do you, sir?’ slapping his tray down so that More splashed his ink. When More reminded him about the penny he’d paid, he opened his eyes wide: ‘I thought that was one time only?’

With a sigh and a half-smile, Master More disbursed.

He thought Thomas More would complain about him to the kitchen steward, who would call him in and hit him. Or perhaps the archbishop himself would call him in and hit him; or being a man of God, only harangue him. If that happened, he was planning to harangue him back. There were things old Morton should know, about how his kitchen was run: pewter that jumped off the table into some blackguard’s sack, fingers that dipped straight from a laundrymaid’s quim and into the fricassee.

But no one called him in. No one hit him: except the usual people, his father Walter, his sisters, his uncles, his aunts, the priest if he could catch him, Sion Madoc’s dad, different members of the Williams family, the Wycks family … but it seemed Thomas More had not hit him, even by proxy. The blow was held in suspension; he felt it hovering in the air, in those years when More used to hunt out heresy, and raid the homes and shops of his friends in the city. And when the blow fell, it was from another direction entirely; it was More who suffered, bundled to the scaffold on a wet July day, one of those days when the wind seems to come at you from all directions at once: the flutter of his shirt as he stood with neck bared, rivulets like tears running down his face, and a fine mist lying over the walls of the Tower, seeming to melt them into the grey, swollen river. It was an easy death, as these things go: a single stroke.

When they met as grown men, More had not remembered him at all.

Eustache Chapuys has returned to a London that is much changed: air sullen with suspicion, a queen come and gone. The king is sweeping up not only those he deems heretics, but also remnants of papistry, so the gaols are full. The ambassador looks fatigued and frail, they say, and expresses no joy at being back in his old post. He, Cromwell, knows there is no point in asking for a visit – being a man of sense Chapuys would not come near him – but he wonders, will he be there when I suffer? He does not want his son to be there, even if it is a simple beheading; he remembers how Gregory suffered at the death of Anne Boleyn, who was a stranger to him. He says to Rafe, ‘It is time for Gregory to write a letter repudiating me. He should speak ill of me. Say he does not know how he comes to be related to such a traitor. He should plead for the chance to redeem my errors and crimes, by serving his Majesty in the years to come.’

‘Yes,’ Rafe says, ‘but you know Gregory’s letters. And now no more for lack of time.’ He pauses. ‘I have had his wife Bess do it. Being the sister of the late Queen Jane, she was best placed, I thought, to touch the king’s heart.’

He thinks, I was always quick in everything; but Rafe Sadler, he is quick when it matters. ‘Even in the midst of his new happiness, I do not doubt he will remember Jane.’

Rafe says, ‘It is forbidden to wear mourning for the death of a traitor. But Richard Cromwell says he will do it.’

‘He should not,’ he says mildly. ‘Tell him it is not what I advise.’

All the same, he smiles. Rafe looks around. ‘Shall I ask Edmund Walsingham to move you elsewhere? It makes me uneasy, this place.’

‘You get used to it. If you stand on that stool, you can get a view of the Byward Tower. Try it.’

Rafe cannot see out, because he is too short. But the attempt allows him to keep his face to the wall till he is composed, and then embrace his master a last time, and go out into the hot afternoon.

When the door has closed, and Rafe’s footsteps and voice have faded away, he opens his books. Volumes of legends, compendiums of saints: legends of consolation. Thank God they did not take them away; but he thinks, I must make sure they do not go astray, after. I must leave a letter about those few possessions I retain, and hope it will be honoured.

He reads the book of Erasmus, Preparation unto Death: written only five, six years back, under the patronage of Thomas Boleyn. It tires his eyes; he would rather look at pictures. He lays the book aside and turns the pages of his engravings. He sees Icarus, his wings melting, plummeting into the waves. It was Daedalus who invented the wings and made the first flight, he more circumspect than his son: scraping above the labyrinth, bobbing over walls, skimming the ocean so low his feet were wet. But then as he rose on the breeze, peasants gaped upwards, supposing they were seeing gods or giant moths; and as he gained height there must have been an instant when the artificer knew, in his pulse and his bones, This is going to work. And that instant was worth the rest of his life.

On the afternoon of 27 July, both the constable and the lieutenant come in. Kingston says, ‘Sir, the king grants you mercy as to the manner of your death. It is to be the axe, and may I say that I rejoice to hear it –’ Kingston breaks off. ‘I beg your lordship’s pardon – I mean to say, your lordship has often sought such mercy for others, and seldom failed.’

So I won’t see August, he thinks. The hares that flee the harvester, the cold morning dews after St Bartholomew’s Day. Or the leaf fall, the dark blue nights.

‘Will it be tomorrow?’

Kingston is not supposed to tell him. But Walsingham says smoothly, ‘If your lordship said your prayers tonight, you would do well.’

Kingston gives up the pretence. ‘I shall come about the accustomed hour of nine, and with you will go Lord Hungerford.’

So I am to die with a monster, he thinks. Or a man who has made monstrous enemies, who have great imaginative powers to shape the condemned to their desires.

Walsingham says, ‘Will you have a confessor?’

‘I will if I can have Robert Barnes.’

The two officers look at each other. ‘You should know he is condemned,’ the lieutenant says. ‘He will go to Smithfield in a day or so.’

‘Alone?’

‘With the priest Garrett, and Father William Jerome. We are waiting for our orders. And certain papists are expected to hang in a day or two: Thomas Abel, that was chaplain to the Princess of Aragon.’

Garrett, Jerome: friends of his and of the gospel. Abel, a veteran opponent. A crowded week, he thinks. ‘I hope there are enough competent people.’

Kingston says testily, ‘We do our best.’

He stands up. He wishes to be left alone. ‘It is not long since I confessed, and I have had scant opportunity of sin since I came here.’

‘That is not it.’ Kingston is disconcerted. ‘You are meant to pass your whole life in review, and discover new sins each time.’

‘I know that,’ he says. ‘I know how to do it. I live here with Thomas More. I have read the books. We are all dying, just at different speeds.’

Walsingham says, ‘The Duke of Norfolk has asked that your lordship be informed – the king marries Katherine Howard tomorrow.’

Christophe says, ‘I will bring my pallet. I will stay beside you tonight.’

‘You need not fear,’ he says. ‘I shall not put an end to myself. I shall trust the headsman to do it quicker than I could.’

‘You will write letters?’

He thinks about it. ‘No. I am done.’

He sends Christophe out to bask in the sunshine: to drink his health, and sit, drowsy, on a wall, among other servants, talking no doubt of the uncertainty of their fortune, with such masters.

He thinks of how tomorrow will be. By rank he is above Hungerford, so he will die first. The king’s decision has spared him much agony and shame. He will pray for a clean stroke. He thinks of Anne Boleyn, ordering up her coronation clothes: ‘Thomas must go into crimson.’

On the scaffold he will praise the king: his mercy, his grace, his care for all his people. It is expected of him, and he has a duty to those left behind. He will say, I am not a heretic, I die a member of the universal church; and let the crowd make what they will of it. Though every man dreads to know the hour of his death, the Christian dreads more a sudden end, such as his father met: mors improvisa with no time to repent. Neighbours in Putney believed Walter Cromwell had mended his ways, given up the drinking, rowing and fighting. But one night he quarrelled with a fellow churchwarden – and it was no godly dispute, it was a row over cockfighting. Coming away, leaving the other fellow with a black eye, Walter kicked his way into the house and shouted for victuals. He was pale and sweating, the witnesses said, but still he fell on a dish of cold meat, all the time vituperating. Next he complained about his dinner, rubbing his chest and saying it had given him a pain; five minutes later he fell face-down on the table. They laid him flat, and, ‘God damn you, I’m choking,’ he said, ‘get me up, get me up –’ and that was the last word he spoke.

There was a good crowd at his burying. He, Thomas, had paid for Masses for his soul. ‘Do you think it does any good?’ he had said to the priest.

‘Don’t despair of him,’ the fellow said. ‘He was rough, but he wasn’t all bad.’

‘No,’ he said, ‘I don’t mean, will prayers do Walter any good. I mean, do they do good for any dead person? God is watching us all our lives. Surely, if you live as long as Walter, God has formed a view. Unless He always knows.’

‘That sounds like heresy to me,’ the priest said.

‘Of course it does. It hits your pocket. If God knows His mind, what becomes of your chantries and your rosaries and your fees for a thousand years of Masses?’

He remembers himself lying smashed and broken in the inn yard in Putney, fifteen years old: his father standing over him, his blood on the cobbles, the twine of his father’s boot sprung free from the leather. Walter shouting down at him and he shouting back, je voudrais mourir autrement – not here, not now, and not like this.

But, no, he thinks, I was not shouting. I did not speak French. Torn and contused, I got myself off the ground and across the Narrow Sea. I fought other men’s wars, for money, till at last I had the sense to earn it in easier ways: Cremuello at your service, your shadow in a glass.

One night long ago in Venice he had glimpsed a woman, a wraith in the watery mist. A courtesan, she let her lazy laughter float after her on the air; the streak of her yellow scarf was the only colour, the click of her shoes on cobbles the only sound. Then a door opened in the wall, and darkness swallowed her up. She was gone so swiftly and completely that he wondered if he had dreamed her. He had thought, if ever I need to disappear, Venice is where I will come.

Sometimes in those days he woke from dreams that threatened to drown him, his eyelashes wet; he woke between languages, not knowing where he was but filled with an inchoate longing to be somewhere else. He thinks back to his childhood, his days on the river, days in the fields. His life has been filled with fugitive women. He remembers the stepmothers Walter would bring home: scarcely had you made your duties to one of them, before Walter fell out with her, or she flounced off with her clothes tied up in a bundle. He thinks of his daughters Anne and Grace; perhaps he will meet them as women grown? He thinks of Anselma’s daughter, moving slowly in his house with soft and curious eyes, picking up those things that belonged to him, his seal, his books, examining his globe of the world and asking, ‘This island, where is this? Is this the New World?’

Mr Wriothesley has moved into Austin Friars, they tell him. The king has ordered him to dissolve the Cromwell household. By day, Call-Me strides through the rooms, expansive, breathing in the smell of paper and ink, rosewater and resin. But by night the leopard pads the floor, smelling the fur of long-dead animals, spaniels and marmosets, gazing upward at the nightingale mute in her cage. She sniffs out the boiled meats of a decade of dinners, and the bones of mice behind the panelling; her opaque, unmoved glance follows the flight of a bird outside the window. He thinks, I have spent hundreds of pounds on glass. Wriothesley cannot dissolve my household. He can only walk through the glass and shatter it, bleeding from a thousand cuts.

Christophe comes back. He looks unsteady: drink, or sun, or something else. He says, ‘You could have stayed out longer. I did not lack for company.’

July, and the nights are short. When the light begins to fade, he sends the boy out again to find his supper, while he thinks of Heaven and Hell. When he pictures Hell he can only think of a cold place, a wasteland, a wharf, a marsh, a landing stage; Walter distantly bawling, then the bawling coming nearer. That is how it will be – not pain itself, but the constant apprehension of pain; the constant apprehension of fault, the knowledge that you are going to be punished for something you couldn’t help and didn’t even know was wrong; and the discord in Hell will be constant, repeating for ever and ever, a violent argument being carried on in the next room. When he thinks of Heaven he imagines it as a vast party arranged by the cardinal; like that field in Picardy, the Field of the Cloth of Gold, with palaces built on unlikely and marginal ground, acres of clear glass catching the sun. But his master should have built in a softer climate. Perhaps, he thinks, this time tomorrow I will inhabit some kinder city: the blue shadows lengthening, the sun’s final rays softening the lines of bell towers and domes; ladies in niches at their prayers, a small dog with a plumed tail strolling the streets; indifferent doves alighting on gilded spires.

After supper he packs up his books. He will ask Kingston to give them to Rafe. He puts away Clendardus, his grammar. He has not made much progress with Hebrew, in part because he has been occupied with the king’s business; there was never a prisoner more hard-pressed, or who called for so much ink. He wishes he had ever met the scholar – Nicolas Cleynaerts, as he is properly; his Antwerp friends say he is a very great linguist, who has spent many hours by lamplight, through the northern winters, learning to copy the loops and curls of Arabic script. In pursuit of books in that tongue he went some years ago to Salamanca, and from there to Granada, but only to be disappointed; the Inquisition is diligent these days in locking away the writings of the Arabs. Some say Clendardus will go into Africa next, and learn to read the holy book of the Mohammedans. He pictures this scholar, strolling through the markets. His diet will be dates and olives, and honeyed pears with orange-blossom water, and lamb baked with saffron and apricots.

All your life you tramp the empty road with the wind at your back. You are hungry and your spirit is perturbed as you journey on into the gloom. But when you get to your destination the doorkeeper knows you. A torch goes before you as you cross the court. Inside there is a fire and a flask of wine, there is a candle and beside the candle your book. You pick it up and find your place is marked. You sit down by the fire, open it, and begin your story. You read on, into the night.

At nine o’clock, 27 July, he kneels down and makes his prayer. He had wondered how you would recognise your dead, when you yourself go to Judgement. But as he waits out this last night, he sees how they are visible, and how they shine. They are distilled into a spark, into an instant. There is air between their ribs, their flesh is honeycombed with light, and the marrow of their bones is molten with God’s grace.

He thinks he sees the eel boy looking at him from the corner of the room. Shog off, you streak of piss, he says.

He does not sleep, then perhaps he does. He dreams of four women, veiled, standing by his bed. He wakes and looks for them in the dark, but there is only Christophe, snoring on his pallet. He pictures Christophe in Calais, at Calkwell Street: his ropes of hair, his unspeakable apron. Who could guess the boy would be the companion of his last night? He thinks of the memory engine, its ledges and recesses, its vaults.

It must be that he sleeps again, because he sees himself as a child. All about him are the airy forms of playmates, other sons that Walter had, sons born before him who had died. He sees these elders, some three or four of them kneeling in profile, carved on a bench end or painted on a wall: their sizes running down from the tallest and the longest dead, to himself, the littlest and the least.

He half-wakes and asks himself, did Walter speak of such sons? Never: yet each time his father had expressed dissatisfaction with him – with, say, a boot or a fist – he had felt their frail dead presence, their silent commiseration, as a faint stir in the air.

The first bells make him sit up. He puts a foot on the floor. He hears Christophe muttering something: prayers, he hopes. He sees himself, crawling across the cobbles in Florence, damaged beyond repair: to the Frescobaldi gate.